NOCC Standard Reports

The 1st edition of the National Outcomes and Casemix Collection Standard Reports constitute the first iteration in the development of the reporting of the National Outcomes and Casemix Collection. The reports are partitioned across three age groups, Child and Adolescents, Adults and Older Persons. Each report has an introductory section which is a Users Guide aimed at explaining the report, its structure and technical considerations during the reports generation.

Click on the links below to download the reports for particular age groups.

While the first edition of the NOCC Standard Reports was designed to meet the information needs of a variety of stakeholders, it was acknowledged that different stakeholders will have different and diverse information requirements that cannot be universally met through a single set of reports. To that end, AMHOCN developed the Web Decision Support Tool to enable users to design their own purpose specific reports with a range of partition and stratification factors.

Review of NOCC Measures

AMHOCN has undertaken a review that critically considers the standardised instruments in the NOCC suite of measures. It provides descriptive and evaluative information on each measure, in a manner that will be useful to clinicians and managers involved in routine mental health outcome measurement as well as others with a more general interest in the area. The review was updated in the light of comments received from the Outcomes Expert Groups, the Australia Heath Ministers Advisory Council National Mental Health Working Group Information Strategy Committee, members of the mhnocc discussion forum and others.

As part of the review of the NOCC measures, an Endnote database was developed to manage the large number of articles and reports reviewed. Download the Endnote database. You will need Endnote software to read this file.

Reporting Framework

The overall purpose of the AMHOCN Reporting Framework is to provide a conceptual basis for the reporting of analyses of the Mental Health National Outcomes and Casemix Collection (NOCC) Data Sets. It is prepared specifically for those information users who intend to develop and analyse reports from NOCC data collected locally (be it at the jurisdictional or organisational level). The Reporting Framework details the key underlying assumptions used in the development on the National Standard Reports. As such, it is an ‘evolving’ document. As further analyses and reporting is undertaken with the National data, it can be anticipated that there will be refinement to the underlying assumptions.

The Key Performance Indicators for Australian Public Mental Health Services report proposed a set of key performance indicators for use in Australia’s public sector mental health services in nine domains: Effective, Appropriate, Efficient, Responsive, Accessible, Safe, Continuous, Capable and Sustainable. The report further specified key performance indicators for 13 Phase 1 indicators for initial trial, on the grounds that these were suitable for immediate introduction based on available data collected by all States and Territories. It also proposed areas for Phase 2 indicator development.

This current report on the potential contributions of the MH-NOCC data proposes additional or modified key performance indicators in the domains of effectiveness, efficiency, accessibility and safety. In doing so, it makes recommendations for Phase 2 indicator development. Sections 2, 3, 4 and 5 propose phase 2 indicators in each of the four domains, respectively, providing a rationale for each and discussing relevant conceptual and technical issues.

Overview of 2006-2007 MH-NOCC Data: Technical and Conceptual Issues

This paper considers overarching technical issues that require consideration as a precursor to the modelling of candidate ‘effectiveness’ Key Performance Indicators from the Mental Health National Outcomes and Casemix Collection (NOCC) datasets and is based on data submitted for the period 1 July 2006 to 30 June 2007 and represent a one-year ‘snapshot’ of routine outcomes collections for participating Mental Health Service Organisations over this period.

Issues considered include: volume and quality of submitted data, limitations of the dataset and how data can be organised to allow measurement and evaluation of Key Performance Indicators for Australia’s public mental health services.

Health of the Nation Outcome Scales - Clinical Significance Survey

AMHOCN had noted that there is little information in the available research literature that assists in determining the validity of ‘clinically significant’ ratings. To get a better understanding of ‘clinical significance’, AMHOCN surveyed members of the Adult, Older Persons and Child & Adolescent Mental Health Outcomes Expert Groups as well as members of the National Mental Health Benchmarking Forums. This report summarising the key findings of the HoNOS Clinical Significance Survey.

This approach to outcome measurement in Australia has yielded a substantial volume of valuable data on mental health outcomes. AMHOCN has analysed and reported on these data via a range of paper-based and electronic reports. A limitation in this enterprise has been that outcomes have been considered for a given collection age group (i.e., adults, children and adolescents, and older people) within a particular mental health service setting (i.e., inpatient, ambulatory, community residential), but it has not been possible to date to guarantee like-with-like comparisons. The next step is to ‘level the playing field’ in some way, to disentangle the reasons for differences in the level of outcome achieved by different services or groups of services. This paper discusses some of the conceptual and practical considerations required to understand and progress the case complexity adjustment agenda.

Analysis of ‘zero’ ratings with the HoNOS suite of NOCC measures

AMHOCN has undertaken some preliminary analyses with the three measures that comprise the HoNOS suite of measures (i.e., the HoNOSCA, the HoNOS and the HoNOS65+). The objectives of these analyses were to explore the extent to which HoNOS clinical ratings might be considered implausible at different service settings and collection occasions and to examine whether implausible ratings are related to specific:

Review of Recovery Measures

AMHOCN was tasked with undertaking a review of available recovery measures and providing a report to the Mental Health Information Strategy Subcommittee (MHISS). The review explicitly considered both instruments designed to measure individuals’ recovery and instruments designed to assess the recovery orientation of services. Download the Review of Recovery Measures